Your TV Show Doesn’t Have To Be A Movie: In Defense Of The Episode (Again)

I’ve been thinking about episodes again, and why the most basic unit of TV storytelling is being undervalued these days.

I wrote about this a couple of years ago, after growing frustrated with too many shows (particularly ones made for streaming services) that had no interest in differentiating one episode from the next, and just offered up 13 amorphous hours of… stuff. But three recent events have put the issue at the front of my mind again.

First, Indiewire, for their weekly TV critics survey, asked a bunch of us to name our favorite concept episode of television ever. We all wound up overthinking it by assuming everyone else was going to pick “Hush” (the silent episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer), thus ensuring that no one actually picked it, but the choices were all interesting, and spoke to the many wonderful things an episode of TV can do and be when the creative team tries hard enough to do something different from what they normally turn out.

Then over the weekend, Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss appeared at South By Southwest, where they looked ahead to the end of the series, and back across an experience that they suggested they didn’t think about as a TV show at all:

It will, of course, shock you to learn that 62 hours of TV do not seamlessly condense into a little over 2 hours, and that the “movie,” while an admirable effort, doesn’t in any way work as a standalone entity. It has to jump from beat to beat, scene to scene, so quickly just to establish all the relevant plot and character points, that a lot of it would make little sense, narratively or emotionally, without having already seen the series. It leaves a bunch of characters on the sidelines because it has no room for them, which then has a ripple effect down the line: It chops out everything with both Tuco and the Cousins, which in turn means the conclusion to the war with Gus happens off-camera, because it would be gibberish without Tio Hector there, and Hector makes no sense if you haven’t already met the rest of his family.

But more than any single editing decision, the movie approach fails because Breaking Bad wasn’t made as a movie — not even, to paraphrase the GoT guys, a 62-hour movie. Vince Gilligan and company were making a television show, by God, with the understanding of the medium’s many distinct and valuable properties. They told a serialized story that’s powerful precisely because you get to see it all unfold over a long period of time, even as each individual episode is treated as its own entity: To borrow the Friends title approach, it’s “The One Where They Dissolve A Body In Acid,” followed by “The One Where Krazy-8’s Locked In The Basement,” or later “The One Where The RV Breaks Down” or “The One With The Train Heist.” Each episode helps add something to the larger story — and takes advantage of the length of a TV series to focus on what Vince Gilligan talks about as “the in-between moments” that crime movies (this fan-made one included) rarely have room to depict — but there’s a specific structure, conflict, and often theme to each that makes it satisfying whether watched a week apart from the others (as it originally aired) or as part of a binge now. You could watch “4 Days Out” without knowing anything about the series and still be wildly entertained by what happens in that hour.

I’ve pretty much given up on Netflix (and Amazon) dramas at this point – I just don’t care to sit through six or seven hours of sluggish storytelling to get to three or four hours of entertainment.

I also think it’s important to distinguish between “a movie for television” and “a novel for television.” A movie is one long story, with no mandated interruptions. A novel, on the other hand, is split into chapters – they may be heavily linked and serialized, but there are still breaks in the drama. It’s important for writers to know how to properly utilize those breaks, much as they should know how to properly utilize individual episodes.

For better or worse, we’re at a point where the form is evolving.I’m kind of looking forward to new permutations. For instance, the new Twin Peaks wasn’t written or produced in an episodic matter. They just shot a giant script and then chopped it into episodes during post-production.

So what if someone did the opposite? Alan cited a bunch of shows that don’t handle individual episodes all that well, so what if some streaming show were to abandon the pretense of episodes altogether and deliver a season as a single 8-12 hour video file, with a handful of intermissions thrown in? I’m willing to bet that some of those Marvel shows could benefit from such an experiment.

Most of those streaming shows would get even worse if they tried that. The highlights of Jessica Jones, by far, were the handful of episodes (Jessica and Kilgrave play house, Kilgrave locked up in the soundproof cell) that were actually structured like episodes. Make it even more formless, and… yikes.

And Lynch and Frost’s approach to filming the new Twin Peaks is yet another reason where I’m approaching the revival with extreme trepidation.

Well sure, it would be dumb if all they did was take the episodes as is and append them to each other. My assumption is that once you decide to present the season as a single, uninterrupted work that a bunch of changes in pace and structure would have to come with it. When making a movie, you can delete a whole subplot in post if it isn’t working. It’s completely normal to have enough material for multiple feature films before you start editing. How often is a TV show allowed to drop all or most of an episode if they feel like it doesn’t work? You basically have to grovel to the network to get permission for that usually, right?

But it feels like a lot of these people are already treating it as one big chunk of story, subdivided roughly every hour or so. I don’t know that making this an official thing would change or improve conditions any.

The problem is that for decades, TV was episodic AND crappy. That led a lot of writers to assume that being episodic is what made it crappy. But that’s not true at all, I have a lot of good memories of great episodes of House or CSI or Criminal Minds that had nothing to do with an overarching plot, but then they’d weave in some season-long stuff that made you want to tune in week after week. I’d be totally cool with a spiritual sequel to The Shield, where there’s some sort of heist or case to solve each week, but also true development of the characters and core story over time. Hoping somebody will figure it out soon, most of the “prestige” shows are getting too far up their own ass at this point. We could use some fun shows.

I think Netflix needs to play with the number of episodes in a season more. Stranger things was as excellent as it was in part because it never overstayed it’s welcome. 8 solid episodes and out. Where as, and you mentioned them, the Marvel shows all have a pacing problem at some point. They start and end well but it’s the middle 8 episodes that can be tricky.

Yeah, I enjoyed Luke Cage but I got about 8 episodes in, one or two past when the apparent big bad got killed; then looked at how many episodes were left and gave up. Spending so much time building up one villain and then turning it over to several more made it seem like a lot of time was wasted.

I do like the idea of taking the standard 3 act story and changing it up. Like in a movie trilogy, each movie should tell its own story, but elements of a broader story should be included making it a 9 act story. Or if a TV show was set up so that the first two acts were actually the conclusion of last week’s episode (acts 2 and 3), then the last part of the show was actually the introduction for the next episode (act 1).
But with these shows that tell a self contained story metered into 13 parts I don’t really think about the elements of the story or if the episode I just watched would work on it’s own. I just think about whether or not I really want to watch the next episode. With the first season of Daredevil, I certainly did. And I don’t binge watch so it actually took a certain amount of discipline (yes, first world discipline) to make myself wait each time. I guess that means their storytelling method works for me. I actually felt that way with Travellers too, but that was definitely episodic. My current obsession is Legion. And I think it falls into the story telling method the author of this piece would agree with, but I am not really sure because every time I watch it I feel like someone put my brain in a clothes washer on high speed and I come out on the other side in a daze.

It’s annoying because some half-hour TV shows have changed up the 3-act story recently to being a 4-act thing with more commercial breaks. So two of the acts don’t get a fair shake and only a few minutes. I forget when this really started but Sepinwall has commented on it in the past (I think New Girl and Brooklyn 99 do this new format).

“but it may be just as much about the showrunners viewing the storytelling model the same way George R.R. Martin does, even though they’re writing for a different medium with different demands.”

IIRC you haven’t read the books alan, but id argue that GRRM actually places a lot of emphasis on making sure each chapter works individually. I think if you replace the word episode for chapter in the list of questions you say tv writers should ask before writing each episode, that GRRM does a very good job at asking himself those questions. One of the reasons I love those books so much despite being much more a fan of television as a medium is because they are written more like a tv show, but without a lot of the constraints tv shows have to work under, like budget and time. Ironically I think the game of thrones books are written much more like a tv show where the show is written a lot more like a “73 hour movie.”

For example, without really getting into spoilers, theres an entire Jaime chapter that is a meeting between him and the rest of the kingsguard that is able to focus on the themes of what it means to be knight that have been emphasized in both the show and books, and Jaime’s own relationship with knighthood, the kingsguard and vows.

There is also an entire tyrion chapter that is a council meeting, which takes place at the beginning of book 3 (or beginning of season 3 in the show timeline) that is able to introduce a lot of new characters like the tyrells and their bannerman, set up plot points/conflicts that will be important for the rest of the book/series, put a lot of fan favorite characters in the same room at the same time, all while operating under the larger goal of establishing how tywin operates as a politician, and under the theme of the spoils of war.

anyways sorry for the long post i couldnt resist. I agree strongly with the main sentiment of this article that tv shows should focus on creating great individual episodes of tv in addition to telling a larger story. This was the first I’d heard about your breaking bad book alan, that sounds awesome! Can’t wait to read it!

Checks out. I agree. Just focus on making good episodes. I think you’ll be able to tie them together. I mean sure it sounds easy, but I bet it’s incredibly difficult. Do you know what you have when it’s on the page, while shooting or until you see it put together? Something to think about when viewing Iron Fist. Did that team think they had a winner on their hands or did they know they were doomed?

I just happen to liken the format as one long continous movie…Before, it was all the ads you had to put up with, now (with streaming), you have to put up with “Last time on so and so”…The only shows that were memorable were the sitcoms of the seventies or eighties like All in the Family, Cheers, Mash, etc. THAT was entertaining…and since writing like that has all but disapeared, I now have to rely on Tella-novel like shows such as GoT, or Bates Motel etc. …

And now South Park is trying to make cohesive story lines spanning an entire season. On their own, each episode is worthless. As a whole, the season (last two) are mediocre. The self-contained singular episodes will always be better than anything soon